Richard Thompson Quotes

If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

I'm an electronic guy, I'm a freak for electronic music but real instruments, the dynamic range of it, and the emotions, there's no comparison.

The only technical things I know are treble, volume and reverb, that's all.

With NOAH, you can create some stunning, yet original soundscapes. Therefore, as a performance tool, it really comes into its own because you can make one single performance which has a lot of detail.

There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.

It's not about how loud you turn the amp up. That's not what makes it sound big. What makes it sound big is fooling around with different delays and reverb settings.

After that initial success, every chance we got we'd hire that remote recording truck and just record stuff at the Whisky because it was so inexpensive.

The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal.

I'm on this eternal quest to get the best guitar sound in the world, but my vision of what is 'the best' changes every time I go into the studio. Sometimes my goal is to make my guitar jump out, and sometimes I want it to lay back.

I like to use effects, but a lot of the time I just can't deal with these tracks with all these artificial sounds.

I don't believe that recordings should sound radically better than the artist, I think that's dishonest. For example, I'm not a great singer but if I spent enough time tweaking my vocals, I could sound like one. But I don't, what you hear is pretty much what I sing.

We always record with the whole band. That's key to capturing the feel, especially trying to get a good basic track.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

We grew up understanding how the analog sound is a driving force for music.

I'm very aware of what, say, electric guitar recordings in the '60s sounded like.

Rock shows are loud, so I try to use a sound that is warm on the high frequencies.

A place like Sound City, which was just a big, beautiful room where you would hit record and capture the sound of the performer - a place like that isn't necessarily in demand anymore.

Makin' records is one art form and playin' live is another. It's like the difference between makin' a movie and doin' theatre.

I think I make good beats, but when it's not mastered correctly, it can definitely make it sound like it's not a good beat, and that has been an issue sometimes with me in the past.

The darned thing about mandolins is they're really hard to turn up as loud as you would need to be to play with a drum set. They cease to sound like mandolins.

When I'm in the studio, I'm experimenting, trying things on.

I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, 'Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.' It was just magic.

I think everyone uses Auto-Tune.

The sound itself, the production, is of such great importance that it has become an integrated part of the composition.